His saving grace - Gene Robinson interview Scotsman
Posted on August 14, 2008
Filed Under Gay News Blog
‘I DON’T know how he sleeps at night.” Bishop Gene Robinson is talking about Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who has just spent a month overseeing the latest ten-yearly gathering of Anglican leaders and failed, yet again, to find any satisfactory resolution to the vexed issue of the church’s opinions on homosexuality which threatens to split the international communion.
It is probably a safe bet – if gambling on holy matters is allowed – that Williams didn’t sleep much during the Lambeth Conference, which ended last week with the church somehow still in one piece. It is a certainty that Robinson – the man who has come to embody all the hopes and fears that homosexuality arouses in the world’s 70 million Anglicans, hasn’t had much rest at all over the past few weeks, although he wasn’t actually invited to the big event.
Now, bathed in the colourful light that pours through the stained glass windows of St John’s Church at Edinburgh’s West End, Robinson, aged 61 and the world’s first openly gay Anglican bishop, is very tired and pretty fed up. He’s finally let slip, just for a moment, the open-hearted optimism which has buoyed him through the five years since his ordination and made him not just bishop but a guiding light for gay and lesbian Christians across the globe and a hate figure for those who believe same-gender sex is , as the Old Testament puts it, “an abomination”.
“Maybe at the end of Lambeth I have discovered I am angrier than I thought I was,” he says, twinkly eyes clouding over.
“I am losing my patience. I have tried to play by the rules and be respectful and sometimes it would be nice to be shown a little respect back. I try to keep my sympathy (for Williams] and I do worry and pray for him. I don’t believe this (refusal to recognise homosexual relationships can have a place within the church] is what’s in his heart – unless he’s changed very much since he became Archbishop of Canterbury.”
Robinson, Bishop of New Hampshire, is speaking with human-rights campaigner Peter Tatchell about homosexuality and religion at the Festival of Spirituality in Edinburgh this month.
His saving grace - Gene Robinson interview
Scotsman
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